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UNIVERSITIES IN A NEOLIBERAL WORLD ALEX CALLINICOS bookmarks publications About the author Alex Callinicos is professor of European studies at King’s College, London. His most recent books include Resources of Critique (Cambridge, 2006) and The New Mandarins of Preface American Power (Cambridge, 2003). He is a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sam Ashman, Michael Bradley, Jane Hardy, Tom Hickey, Judith Orr, Malcolm Povey, Mark Thomas, Alexis Wearmouth and Terry Wrigley for their help in s joint general secretary of UCU (the University and College Union) and writing this pamphlet. I also greatly benefited from participating in the conference former general secretary of Natfhe since 1998 I have frequently spoken on “Universities in a Neoliberal World”, held at the University of Manchester in November Athe experiences of students or our members in higher education (HE). Alex 2005 (www.socialsciences.man.ac.uk/socialanthropology/events/possiblefutures/unlw.html); I am grateful to the organisers for inviting me. Callinicos has done us all a service by theorising from our experience and our practice in HE. Contents We have the obscene spectacle of a cabinet stuffed with former student radi- Preface by Paul Mackney 3 Introduction 5 cals who never paid fees, and who were eligible for grants, pulling up the ladder Neoliberalism and the “knowledge economy” 8 for this generation. When Jack Straw was president of the National Union of Harnessing knowledge to profits 12 Students (NUS) and leading us in the fight to increase grants, he railed at a gov- Strip mining universities 16 Proletarianisation and precarity 24 ernment forcing university students to choose between a book and a meal. Resistance is not futile 34 Students in the 21st century have to choose between finishing an assignment Notes 40 and doing another shift at the supermarket. The NUS and lecturer unions held a consistent line against top-up fees, saying that tuition fees would turn certain social groups off university. And the introduction of top-up fees has seen a reverse of this trend to expansion with almost 4 percent fewer applicants this year (2006). We warned that a market in higher education would lead to students choosing the cheapest courses rather than the most suitable. We said access to education should be based on ability to study and not on ability to pay That is why UCU stood with the NUS against raising the cap on fees. The NUS stood with us in UCU in our battle for decent pay. But when we look ahead, we need to restate the case against fees altogether. The 19th century was about the expansion of free elementary education. The 20th century was about the expansion of free secondary education and the 21st century should be about the expansion of free further and higher education. Further and higher education should become a human right, not a privilege. The ministers keep saying the resources for expanding FE and HE (without student fees) aren’t there, even though students and lecturers, indeed most of the population, can see that this is patently untrue. It’s simply a question of priorities. The government could start by raiding the budgets for war. They could Universities in a Neoliberal World – Alex Callinicos First published November 2006 by Bookmarks Publications, London WC1B 3QE save a fortune by bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. We ([email protected]) were told before New Labour’s second term that Gordon had a war chest to © Bookmarks Publications spend on HE. We may have been naïve but neither we nor the minister at the ISBN 1898877467 Designed by Bookmarks Publications time expected him to fritter it away on an illegal and unwinnable war. Printed by Pioneer Print Limited, London E18 The government, establishment and business leaders are just as ambivalent 3 about further and higher education now as they were in the 19th century. Then they needed a more educated workforce to handle the new machinery. They Introduction didn’t want to pay for it. Many maintained that the workers and peasants were too unintelligent to learn to read, right and add up. And quite a few, quite cor- rectly, were worried that if they did it might be very dangerous. Until the 1960s technical education was all there was for the working-class. ritain’s universities have been undergoing a dramatic period of change. Universities were largely to replenish the old professions (medicine, law, politics The most obvious sign of these transformations is physical expansion. In and the church) and to provide a cadre of people with the sense of superiority to B2004-5 there were 2,287,540 students in higher education.1 Some 30 per- run the British Empire. Traditionally, educational theorists used to distinguish cent of 18 and 19 year olds in England now go to university, compared to only between narrow training and broadening education. Ironically, 21st century about 7 percent in the early 1960s. University education has ceased to be the capitalism brings them together because a broad education provides the prob- privilege of a tiny minority – although it is still much harder for people from a lem-solving workers that the so-called knowledge economy needs – but it does manual working-class background to get to university.2 it on the cheap. Some people reject university expansion on elitist grounds, repeating the It’s an irony of history that the first generation of students to suffer from top- playwright John Osborne’s slogan “More means worse.” Thus right wing up fees are the very school students who walked out over the war on Iraq, who columnist Peter Hitchens denounces the last Tory prime minister, John Major, have engaged with social movements such as the European Social Forum, who for initiating the present university expansion, “another grave attack on the have turned out at Unite Against Fascism pickets. I remain convinced that just quality of education”.3 The New Labour government, by contrast, claims that as they have won the argument for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, they university expansion is a matter of social justice: “All those who have the poten- will find new ways of organising resistance. As Alex says, their brothers and sis- tial to benefit from higher education should have the opportunity to do so. This ters in France and Greece have shown the way and his pamphlet provides the is a fundamental principle which lies at the heart of building a more socially just context for the debate on how that can be achieved. society, because education is the best and most reliable route out of poverty and It is my hope, at the time of writing, that 120,000 members of the new disadvantage”.4 University and College Union will elect a leadership to enable them to stand Expanding higher education is undeniably a noble goal. The elitists are quite with students for free comprehensive post-school education. While making his- wrong: so long as suitable resources are provided, there is no reason why the tory is not simply a matter of will, it is nevertheless the case that people government target of 50 percent of 18 to 30 year olds or indeed more shouldn’t organised can change things. Pass it on. The idea is subversive. Organise your- have a university education and benefit from the experience. But the reality of selves: together we can change things. higher education is very different from official proclamations about equality of opportunity and social justice. Paul Mackney British universities are in fact being driven by priorities shaped by the needs Natfhe general secretary 1997 – 2005 of big business. They are being reconstructed to provide British and foreign cor- UCU joint general secretary June 2005 – June 2006 porations with the academic research and the skilled workers that they need to stay profitable. At the same time they are being transformed from scholarly November 2006 institutions into profit centres earning foreign exchange for the economy of the United Kingdom. To this end, expansion takes place on the cheap, as resources per student are slashed, and universities, departments and individual academics are encouraged to compete with each other. The shift away from student grants to loans and tuition fees forces many students to work long hours to support themselves in preparation for a life of wage-labour. No wonder potential students from poorer backgrounds are being discouraged from going to university. 4 Universities in a Neoliberal World Alex Callinicos 5 This transformation is far from unique. Universities all over the world are ence of teaching in British universities for over a quarter of a century, and being pressured to make the same kind of changes. And this restructuring of thereby witnessing the changes examined here. higher education is part of a much broader, indeed literally global, economic But I don’t attack these changes out of nostalgia for an idealised past. I have and political process known as neoliberalism. Embraced by virtually every gov- no desire to return to the much smaller and more privileged university system of ernment in the world along with the business and media elites since it was earlier years. Opposing neoliberalism in higher education should be part of the pioneered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, neoliberal- struggle for a society that really does give everyone an equal chance to realise ism seeks to subject every aspect of social life to the logic of the market, and to themselves. Accordingly, my theoretical framework is provided by Marx’s make everything into a commodity that can be privately owned and bought and analysis of the capitalist economic system.

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